


one man's trash

by ADreamingSongbird



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: AU where things don't hurt and Sing lives with his cousins the Wongs and helps them run Chang Dai, Family Fluff, Gen, may soo-ling: origins, or: sing gets a cat. shorter was not informed.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 08:16:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17783834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ADreamingSongbird/pseuds/ADreamingSongbird
Summary: Shorter comes home to find that Sing has pulled something interesting out of a dumpster. Specifically, something with pitiful eyes, four paws, and sharp claws.Or: how Shorter Wong gets roped into letting Sing adopt a demon cat.





	one man's trash

**Author's Note:**

> written for @sswagpoke on twitter for the banana fish valentine's 2019 exchange! i'm sorry i couldn't fulfill your exact requests - i know -3 things about baseball, unfortunately - but i hope you enjoy this shorter & sing content all the same, and happy valentine's day!

As soon as Shorter shuts the door behind him, Sing’s voice rings out.

“Oh—who’s home? Uh… Shorter…?”

Uh oh. _That’s_ not a good Sing voice. That’s the “I broke Nadia’s favorite mug because I thought I could get things off the top shelf without the step stool but I was wrong” voice. Or the “I dropped a bowl of soup on your favorite shoes” voice. Or the “I sent a baseball through someone’s window but ran away before seeing whose window it was” one. Point is, it’s a Sing voice that always heralds bad news.

Toeing out of his sneakers and hanging his coat up by the door, Shorter sighs. “What’d you do, kid?”

Sing sounds mildly offended now, accusatory and defensive. “Why do you have to assume I did something?”

“You _always_ did something.” Shorter heads for his room. “So you’re right, wrong question on my part. What’d you do _this time?”_

“Don’t be fucking rude,” Sing complains, but there’s no bite in his voice whatsoever. Shorter sticks his head around the door.

“If you’re gonna say fuck, you better mean—oh my _god,_ Sing, what the _fuck_ did you do this time, holy shit—”

Sitting in Sing’s lap is a miserable little creature, bundled up in one of Shorter’s hoodies (why’s it _his_ hoodie? Sing has hoodies! Little thieving bastard!) and settled onto its haunches like a rotisserie chicken. If rotisserie chickens wear hoodies. Stolen hoodies, at that.

Sing places a hand on its back defensively. “She’s just a cat.”

_“Just_ a cat?!” Shorter claps a hand to his forehead. “Sing, what the fuck, where did you get that? Put it back, we don’t have anything you need for cats! Don’t they like, shit in boxes? We don’t have a cat shit box. What are you gonna do with it?”

“She’s not an _it,_ she’s a _she,”_ Sing protests, hugging the pitiful cat closer to his chest. “Her name is May.”

“Oh my god, you already named it?” Shorter groans. This is the last thing they need right now. It’s a busy time of year with Chang Dai offering a Christmas special, and nobody has time to take care of a pet. Where the fuck did Sing even find a cat? Or did he steal it from someone? “Sing, no, why did you even… where…”

“Mrrow,” the cat interrupts, turning to nuzzle her face into Sing’s elbow. Sing absolutely melts, his face lighting up, and scratches under her chin with the other arm.

Oh, fuck. He’s already attached. He’s already so, so attached.

Okay. That’s fine. This is fine. All they have to do is get a cat shit box and cat food and cat bowls before Nadia comes home. But they can’t take the cat shopping—cats can’t ride motorcycles!—and they also can’t just leave it in the apartment alone, right? Is it even house-trained? How do you house-train a cat? What if it’s feral?

Shorter takes a deep breath and rakes his hand through his hair. “Sing Soo-Ling, where the _fuck_ did you get that cat.”

Sing, cradling it defensively in his arms almost like a baby, turns pitiful, soulful eyes up to him. “I went to take out the trash and she was stuck in the dumpster. She was crying and wailing and when I let her out she just climbed up my arm to my shoulder, and then she even let me take her in and give her a bath. She’s really sweet, Shorter, and it’s so cold out, we can’t just put her back on the street! She could die!”

“Hm.” Shorter sighs. The streets in winter can be pretty harsh, especially for a cat dumb enough to get stuck in a dumpster. But even if it wasn’t a real stupid-ass cat, Sing’s molten sad eyes and little twelve-year-old pout would’ve won him over. God dammit. “If Nadia says it—she—has to go, she goes. You hear?”

Sing lights up. “Yeah!”

“So. Why’d you put her in _my_ clothes?” Shorter asks, plopping down on Sing’s bed and reaching a tentative hand over for the cat to sniff. “Yours weren’t good enough?”

The cat—May—sniffs his fingers for a long moment. Then she yawns.

“Yours are bigger and I could wrap her up better,” Sing says, ducking his head. “Besides, yours are cozier.”

Shorter lets out a bark of laughter. “We have some of the literal same hoodies in different sizes, you little twerp!”

Still, it’s actually a little adorable to know that Sing thinks his clothes are cozier just by virtue of being his, even if they’re from the same manufacturer. Sing is a cute kid. And he hates to admit it, but the cute kid with a cute cat is kind of a killer combo. Nadia probably won’t be able to say no either.

Looks like they’ve got a cat now.

“Well, yeah, but that’s not the point!” Sing huffs, scratches behind May’s ears again, and then kisses the top of her head. “Besides, she was cold, and I didn’t want her to get sick after I bathed her. She actually kind of liked the shower. I thought cats were supposed to hate water.”

“Well, squirt, I guess you found yourself a cat as weird as you.” Shorter grins as Sing rolls his eyes, rubbing one finger along May’s chin. “Maybe she’ll fit in better than I expect—ow! What the shit?”

May retracts her paw primly, claws already back inside as if they never came out, except that the red scratches on the back of his hand beg to differ. She lays her head back into the crook of Sing’s elbow and trills softly, stretches her neck out, and flops against him.

Shorter stares at her incredulously. “The fuck was that for, you goblin?”

“It was for calling me weird,” Sing says, just as prim as the cat, but a thousand times more smug. “She’s a good girl and she knows whose side she’s on.”

“I changed my mind,” Shorter mutters, no heat in his words. So the cat’s a picky fuck. That’s fine. That’s great. “Get rid of the cat.”

“Absolutely not.” Sing looks at him with great delight, takes a moment, and then says, perfectly emphatic, “Fuck you.”


End file.
